At issue in this case was whether three software programmers who created the BnetD game server -- which interoperates with Blizzard video games online -- were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Blizzard Games' end user license agreement (EULA).

EFF and Davis Wright Tremaine LLP are defending the Yes Men and other activists in a lawsuit filed against them by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over political criticism of the Chamber's stance on climate change legislation.

In this copyright infringement case the district court issued a dangerous ruling compelling TorrentSpy to create and store logs of its users' activities as part of electronic discovery obligations in a civil lawsuit.

On June 20 2006 EFF filed an amicus brief arguing that a battle between Internet real estate services over copyrighted images should not threaten the rights of users to surf webpages and send emails anonymously.

EFF filed suit on November 1 2007 against the man behind "craigslist-perverts.org" -- a website that publicized responses to fake personal advertisements posted on Craigslist.org -- on behalf of an online journalist who criticized the controversial outing campaign and received legal threats in re

EFF has asked a federal court to reject efforts by Echostar to get the names and addresses of every customer that purchased a free-to-air satellite receiver. Echostar claims that the receiver can be modified to pirate DISH satellite TV programming.

This is one of the thousands of cases filed by RIAA member companies against individuals for P2P file sharing. EFF filed an amicus brief on behalf of the defendant asking the court to reject the recording industry's claims that file sharing infringes the distribution right.

In a legal battle over Internet music storage that could impact innovation and free expression on the Internet EFF Public Knowledge and other public interest groups asked a federal judge in an amicus brief to protect the "safe harbor" rules for online content in EMI v. MP3Tunes.

On December 22 2008 GateHouse Media sued the New York Times alleging that the "hyper-local" news aggregation pages on the New York Times-owned site Boston.com infringed its copyright and trademark rights.

Ditto.com (formerly known as Arriba Soft) was an early image search engine similar to Google's Image Search. So for example by entering "sailboat" into the Ditto website the searcher would be shown a selection of images of sailboats from around the Web.

EFF has teamed up with the law firm of Winston & Strawn to represent Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen authors of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City as well as their publisher Process Media in a petition to cancel the registration of bogus trademarks

EFF along with Public Citizen and Public Knowledge are urging a U.S. court of appeals to reject jewelry-maker Tiffany's attempt to rewrite trademark law and create new barriers for online commerce and communication.

Lexmark one of the largest makers of laser printers is a believer in the "give away the razors but charge them for the blades" tactic counting on the fact that consumers routinely underestimate "life cyle costs" for products like printers.

In 2005, Macrovision sued Sima to block the sale of the Sima CopyThis! (CT-1, CT-Q1, CT-100, CT-2, CT-200) and GoDVD (SCC, and SCC-2) products, which are designed to digitize analog video, such as the analog video outputs of DVD players and analog VCRs.

EFF asked an Illinois judge to quash subpoenas issued in a "reverse class action" lawsuit accusing thousands of people of illegally downloading pornography, and urged the court to dismiss the case. In a friend of the court brief , EFF argued that the plaintiff's "class action" strategy is an imp

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is fighting back against Uri Geller -- the "paranormalist" famous for seemingly bending spoons with his mind -- on behalf of a YouTube critic who was silenced by Geller's baseless copyright claims.

Copyright troll Righthaven sued the Center for Intercultural Organizing for copyright infringement, but the case was dismissed in April 2001. The judge ruled that the non-profit organization’s use of the news article was a non-infringing fair use. Righthaven appealed, seeking to rewrite fair us

EFF has urged a federal judge to reject arguments from Warner Brothers Entertainment claiming that the company’s automated scheme to send copyright infringement notices absolves it of responsibility for the system’s major flaws. In this case, Warner is accused of sending thousa

Dajaz1.com, a website dedicated to hip hop music and culture, was seized by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security over the 2010 Thanksgiving weekend. For over a year, visitors could not get access to any content on the blog. However, as w

Fighting the abuse of copyright law to stifle competition, EFF helped Skylink score an important victory in the Federal Circuit that puts much-needed limits on the controversial "anti-circumvention" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Chamberlain, the manufacturer of garage doors, invoked the provision to stop Skylink from selling a "universal" remote control that works with Chamberlain garage doors. The court rejected Chamberlain's claims, noting that if it adopted the company's interpretation of the DMCA, it would threaten many legitimate uses of software within electronic and computer products – something the law aims to protect.

EFF helped defend a printer cartridge company against a competitor's overreaching copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Lexmark brought a DMCA lawsuit against Static Controls in an effort to eliminate the market for remanufactured or refilled Lexmark toner cartridges, which would have forced owners of Lexmark laser printers to buy more expensive cartridges from Lexmark. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately rejected that effort, concluding that Lexmark's "protection measure" was aimed at protecting the company from legitimate competition, rather than "piracy."

EFF protected innovation and fair use by defending "intermediate" copying. Major motion picture studies filed a copyright infringement suit against two companies that made and distributed copies of movies with sexual and violent content removed. To make those copies, the companies first made an initial, "intermediate" copy of the entire movie, which the MPAA alleged were also infringing. Because such copies are crucial to the process of creating new works, EFF filed an amicus brief arguing that those copies were legal if the final copies were as well. The MPAA then backed off and withdrew its "intermediate copying" argument in front of the judge.

EFF defended the free speech rights of a website publisher who had repeatedly received baseless threats from the corporate owners of Barney the Dinosaur. The Lyons Partnership wrongly claimed that Dr. Stuart Frankel's online parody of Barney violated copyright and trademark laws. EFF filed suit on Dr. Frankel's behalf, forcing Lyons Partnership to withdraw their threats and compensate Dr. Frankel for the cost of his legal fees.

Standing up for the public's right to make legal, fair uses of copyrighted material, EFF successfully defended the creators of a parody flash animation piece using Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" - and uncovered evidence that the classic folk song is in fact already part of the public domain.

EFF defended the free speech and fair use rights of an online newsletter publisher after the world's third largest pharmaceutical company that accused him of trademark infringement and cybersquatting. Since March 2004, AcompliaReport.com has published original news and commentary about clinical trials of Acomplia, a new medication. Drug maker Sanofi-Aventis asked an international arbitrator to transfer the domain name, claiming that the use of the drug's name created a "risk of confusion." With EFF's assistance, the site's publisher asked a U.S. district court to declare that his use of the drug name was a fair use, made in good faith. The parties subsequently entered into a settlement that protected the publisher's right to the site's address.

Fighting the over-reach of trademark law, EFF signed on as co-counsel to a small travel services company, JSL, after credit card giant Visa convinced a federal court in Las Vegas to prevent the company from using the domain name "evisa.com." In December of 2003, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with EFF that JSL's use of the generic term "visa" does not threaten or "dilute" Visa's trademark for credit cards, keeping the word in the dictionary (and domain name system servers) for now.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) threatened security researchers from Princeton and Rice to stop them from publishing their study of a weak technological protection scheme for CDs called SDMI. EFF filed a lawsuit to protect the researchers' First Amendment right to publish the paper, and the RIAA backed off from its threats. The protection scheme was never deployed and the researchers were able to present the paper at Usenix Security, 2001.

Taxes.com showed up frequently in search engine results for "J.K. Harris," a chief competitor criticized on the website. J.K. Harris asked a federal court to deem this a violation of trademark law. Instead, the court rejected the claim and embraced EFF's arguments, pointing out that the information on the pages was completely truthful and useful to consumers.

EFF successfully blocked a brazen attempt to unmask the identities of anonymous members of an online discussion group for embroidery fans. The online group was created to share information about a long-running campaign to threaten purchasers of embroidery designs and software with copyright infringement lawsuits. The Embroidery Software Protection Coalition (ESPC), a purported coalition of embroidery pattern design companies, is behind the heavy-handed campaign. ESPC filed defamation claims against some members of the group and then issued a subpoena for detailed personal information about every single person who joined the discussion group--whether or not they had ever posted a single message.

EFF helped preserve the legal protections for actually private websites while protecting your right to read public websites.

This case involved a lawsuit against DirecTV for accessing the public website of anti-DirecTV activists run by plaintiff Michael Snow. The website had a banner and purported Terms of Service forbidding DirecTV representatives from entering the site or using its message board, but it was configured such that anyone in the public could enter the site, create a profile, and use the board. Setting aside a privacy-destroying lower court decision, the Eleventh Circuit agreed with EFF's arguments and ruled that web sites are protected by the Stored Communications Act, except when they are configured to be readily accessible to the general public.

When internal memos exposing flaws in Diebold Election Systems' electronic voting machines leaked onto the Internet, Diebold used bogus copyright threats to silence its critics. EFF fought back on behalf of an ISP, winning an award of damages, costs, and attorneys' fees. Equally important, the case set a precedent that will allow other Internet users and their ISPs to fight back against improper copyright threats.

EFF urged a federal judge to protect fair use of news coverage and reject the Associated Press’ (AP’s) dangerously narrow view of what is “transformative” in a copyright court battle over a news-tracking service.

EFF protected anonymous speech and fought off a controversial self-help group's abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA's subpoena process is ripe for abuse, because it lets content owners unmask an alleged infringer without first filing an actual lawsuit. Landmark Education sent subpoenas to Google and the Internet Archive to unmask whoever had posted a documentary criticizing the organization, even though the use did not infringe any of Landmark's copyrights. EFF defended the anonymous Google poster and the Internet Archive, and Landmark quickly backed down.

A group of Reddit “gaymers” fought back with EFF's help to protect the name of their online forum after a website operator managed to register the term as a trademark and then claimed the group’s Reddit forum infringed his trademark rights. In a petition filed with the U.S.

The Supreme Court's ruling in Sony v. Universal Studios (aka the Betamax case) is a landmark copyright precedent that has sheltered a wide array of technology innovators from lawsuits at the hands of the entertainment industries.

In this case, EFF backed Internet service providers (ISPs) in an effort to quash subpoenas issued in a predatory lawsuit over the alleged illegal downloading of adult material. The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the ACLU of the Nation’s Capitol joined EFF in the amicus brief, argu

EFF is urging a federal judge to quickly resolve a dispute over the use of the term “Mormon” in an online dating site, arguing that extended litigation based on a frivolous claim could bury a small business in its infancy. Intellectual Reserve, Inc., which manages intellectual property rights fo

IP-Watch, a non-profit independent news site, is suing the United States Trade Representative to compel disclosure of documents under the Freedom Of Information Act. IP-Watch is represented by Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic.

EFF established that the FCC and Hollywood don't control your TiVo - you do.

The FCC's "broadcast flag" mandate would have given copyright holders and the government a veto over development and use of digital television tuners. Only technologies crippled by copy protection would have been legal. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded, as EFF and a coalition of public interest groups had argued, that the FCC lacked authority to regulate what happens inside your TV or computer once it has received a broadcast signal.

This case tests whether the "first sale doctrine" in copyright law -- which makes it legal to resell, lend, or give away books, CDs, DVDs, and software that you own -- will survive in the digital age of "licensed" con

In the U.S., two copyrights generally exist for every song you hear on the radio or online. One relates to the underlying musical work (think sheet music). It typically belongs to a music publisher or songwriter.

"Technical standards incorporated into law are some of the most important rules of our modern society. In a democracy, the people must have the right to read, know, and speak about the laws by which we choose to govern ourselves.”

In this case, Fox News sued a company called TVEyes, claiming the company’s text-searchable database of television and radio content—used by journalists, scholars, and political campaigns to study and monitor the national media—infringed its copyright in its programming.

EFF supported Viacom in a lawsuit over a parody of a popular online video called “What What (In the Butt),” arguing that South Park’s reimagining of the work is a clear case of fair use and that the district court’s early dismissal of the case was correct.

Teleflex Inc. sued the defendant KSR International, claiming that one of KSR's products infringed its patent on connecting an adjustable vehicle control pedal to an electronic throttle control. KSR argued that merely combining these two elements was obvious and therefore not patentable.

At issue in Oracle v. Google is whether Oracle can claim a copyright on Java APIs and, if so, whether Google infringes these copyrights. When it implemented the Android OS, Google wrote its own version of Java.

Aereo was a company that let users watch local channels by renting their own small antenna located at the Aereo facility, with the signal from the antenna sent over the Internet to that single user.In a lawsuit, TV networks argued that this constituted a public pe

Green v. Department of Justice is an EFF lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions on First Amendment grounds.

Google v Equustek involves a legal challenge to an extraterritorial order from a Canadian court. EFF intervened in the case after a trial court ruled in June that Google must remove links to full websites that contained pages selling a product that allegedly infringed trade secret rights.